- Guinea-Bissau: Junta Court Orders Opposition Leader Back to Jail
Source: US News & World Report
“Guinea-Bissau opposition leader and former Prime Minister Domingos Simoes Pereira was moved back to prison last Friday following a decision by the West African country’s military court, his family told Reuters. The junta that seized power in Guinea-Bissau in a coup last year released Pereira, the leader of the revolutionary PAIGC party, in February in an apparent attempt to appease the West African regional bloc ECOWAS. He had remained under house arrest on suspicion of economic crimes. … Pereira was previously detained on November 26 when a group of army officers seized power before the planned announcement of presidential election results.” (07/13/26)
- Trump regulators move to curtail lending to immigrants without Very Special Important Permission Slips
Source: Politico
“Federal regulators on Monday directed banks and credit unions to more closely scrutinize the loans they make to immigrants who are in the country illegally [sic], as part of the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown. In new guidance, regulators said that undocumented immigrants may present an ‘elevated credit risk’ and warned banks to account for the risk that they may lose their job or be deported as they underwrite new loans. Financial institutions, the guidance says, should take into account that a customer’s status as an unauthorized immigrant may pose a risk to their ability to repay credit cards, mortgages, auto loans or other loans.” (07/13/26)
- Colombia: Petro blocks military inauguration for successor
Source: United Press International
“Outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro has barred President-elect Abelardo De la Espriella from holding his inauguration at a military base, triggering an unprecedented institutional dispute that has clouded the transfer of power and underscored the country’s deep political polarization. Citing his authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces until Aug. 7, the leftist president blocked De la Espriella’s plan to take the oath of office before military personnel. The incoming government had sought to use the ceremony to signal a sharp break with the outgoing administration’s security policies.” (07/13/26)
- Paramount, WBD hit with lawsuit from 12 states, including California, to block merger
Source: CNBC
“A group of 12 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging Paramount Skydance’s
proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The lawsuit seeking to block the merger for antitrust concerns was brought by a group including California Attorney General Rob Bonta. CNBC’s David Faber reported earlier that the lawsuit was expected to come on Monday. Representatives for Paramount and Bonta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The deal would combine two storied film studios — Paramount and Warner Bros. — as well as streaming platforms Paramount+ and HBO Max.” (07/13/26)https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/13/paramount-wbd-merger-lawsuit.html
- Hegseth says US regime is creating task force to prosecute leaks to news media
Source: Reuters
“The U.S. Department of Justice and the Pentagon have created a joint task force to identify and prosecute what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information to news media. ‘I have delegated tasking authority to the War Department’s [sic] Office of General Counsel, empowering OGC to request and receive all information, records, and support across the department concerning media leak investigations,’ Hegseth said in a video posted to X.” [editor’s note: The War Department doesn’t have an Office of General Counsel because the War Department doesn’t exist – TLK] (07/13/26)
- South Africa: Blow to corruption case as key suspect pulls out of plea deal
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“Vusimusi ‘Cat’ Matlala, a key figure in a ongoing police corruption inquiry in South Africa, has withdrawn from a controversial plea deal, serving a blow to prosecutors. The business tycoon pulled out of the agreement after a South African court recommended a higher jail sentence – 12 years instead of the agreed eight. Matlala was accused of bribing top police officials to win a 360m rand ($22m; £16.5m) tender for his health company Medicare24 in 2024. He pleaded guilty last month, as part of a deal that could have seen Matlala giving key evidence against senior officials. Though disappointed by Matlala’s U-turn, the state still believes it has a ‘strong and winnable case’, Kaizer Kganyago, a spokesperson for the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) told journalists on Monday.” (07/13/26)
- India: Inflation accelerates to 4.38% in June, exceeding forecasts
Source: CNBC
“India’s consumer price inflation rose to 4.38% in June, up from 3.93% in May as the U.S.-Iran war and a weak monsoon raised food and fuel prices, adding to cost pressures. The headline inflation number was above economists’ expectations for a 4.30% rise, according to a Reuters poll. … Last month, India’s central bank kept interest rates unchanged but said it expects inflation to rise and growth to temper in the financial year ending March 2027.” (07/13/26)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/13/india-june-inflation-oil-food-iran-war.html
- EU rallies dozens of nations to pledge $1 billion for recovery fund in Gaza
Source: SFGate
“The European Union coordinated efforts to raise 900 million euros ($1 billion) in aid for Gaza, working with 65 governments and organizations including the White House and the United Nations, the bloc’s top diplomat said Monday. Kaja Kallas announced the fund after a meeting of the Palestine Donors Group in Brussels. ‘The EU is the most credible supporter, for the Palestinian people. We are the largest donor and the strongest backer of the two-state solution,’ she said. The meeting was the second gathering of the Team Gaza Initiative, an effort by the EU to rally support for recovery projects like sanitation and farming in the destitute and war-ravaged coastal enclave of some 2 million people.” (07/13/26)
- El Salvador: Party nominates Bukele for third term as president
Source: Yahoo! News
“El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has secured the nomination of his ruling Nuevas Ideas party for the 2027 presidential election, the party said late on Sunday, following legal changes that cleared the way for his seeking a third term. … In July 2025, the ruling party’s allies in Congress dismantled previous constitutional safeguards and approved new measures that allow indefinite presidential reelection.” (07/13/26)
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/el-salvador-presidents-party-nominates-115541893.html
- ME: ICE gang murders driver
Source: New York Post
“A driver was shot dead Monday while [supposedly] trying to mow down Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) [gang members] in Maine, according to authorities. Graphic footage on social media shows a man lying by the side of the road near a car, with a bullet hole visible through the driver’s side of the front windshield following the incident in Biddeford just after 7:15 a.m., the Portland Press Herald reported. The unidentified driver reportedly accelerated at ICE [gang members] at an intersection in the small town before the officers shot him dead, eyewitnesses said. … Details on the fatal shooting are still coming through, although locals reported seeing an increase in ICE [gang] activity in Biddeford in recent weeks.” (07/13/26)
- Graham Platner and the Rationalization of Everything
Source: American Greatness
by Stephen Soukup“Regular readers may note that I am rather deeply haunted by a paragraph written almost exactly a decade ago by the late, great Angelo Codevilla. It was, perhaps, his most important warning to us, and it remains one of the few political predictions ever made that keeps me awake at night. In the waning days of the 2016 campaign, after watching the way the entire ruling class had mobilized to deride Donald Trump and to ensure his defeat, Codevilla penned an essay titled After the Republic, in which he forewarned: We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation.” (07/13/26)
https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/13/graham-platner-and-the-rationalization-of-everything/
- Trump’s Health Is … Complicated
Source: Persuasion
by Sam Kahn“He isn’t as decrepit as Democrats pretend. But Republicans are slowly imagining a post-Trump world.” (07/13/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/trump-is-old-but-senile-probably
- Congressional Ratification of President Trump’s Corporatism
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
by Ron Paul“Despite regularly denouncing the rising socialist menace, President Trump has been pursuing a policy arguably just as, if not more, dangerous to liberty and prosperity as anything proposed by Zohran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders: using government funds to purchase partial ownership of private companies. The Trump administration has obtained ownership interests of approximately 27 billion dollars in 30 companies since January of 2025. While President Trump and his defenders claim making these ‘investments’ will benefit the American people, the truth is this policy will harm most Americans.” (07/13/26)
- Lindsey Graham’s Legacy? It’s About One Thing Only, and It Isn’t Good
Source: The New Republic
by Michael Tomasky“He alone had the moral authority within the Republican Party to try to stop Donald Trump, especially after January 6. He chose not to. That’s what we must remember today.” (07/13/26)
https://newrepublic.com/article/212980/lindsey-graham-legacy-trump-enabler
- DEI“A” Directive Denied
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob“Daymon Johnson has been fighting to speak freely. A professor at Bakersfield College, a community college in California, Johnson has for years been bucking a mandate that he parrot the state’s ‘DEI’ and ‘anti-racist’ ideology — well, DEIA now: ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ — lest he face disciplinary action or receive the boot. Community colleges, remember, are creations of the state, and Professor Johnson was being forced, by state directive, to mouth specific bureaucratic verbiage as if he were a mere functionary under a central planning board. … this imperfect ruling paves the way for further vindications.” (07/13/26)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/07/13/deia-directive-denied/
- The Democratic Socialists Aren’t Fringe Anymore
Source: Town Hall
by Jay Rogers“I spend my days reading growth curves. A pension fund’s unfunded liability, a private equity fund’s internal rate of return, a hedge fund’s drawdown. You learn to read a line on a chart the way a doctor reads one on a different kind of monitor. Most political organizations produce a flat line for decades, a small bump around an election, then flat again. The Democratic Socialists of America just produced a line that would get flagged in any diligence memo I’ve written in 30 years. An organization with 6,000 members in 2015 crossed 100,000 in February 2026, and by this July had passed the old high-water mark for American socialism: the roughly 113,000 members the Socialist Party of America claimed at its 1912 peak under Eugene Debs. DSA now calls itself, correctly, the largest socialist organization in American history.” (07/13/26)
- A Doctor in the Chemist’s
Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie“There is a small alcove at the back of most chemist shops these days, usually curtained off, where a pharmacist jabs your arm with a flu vaccine or a Covid booster while you sit with your sleeve rolled up. It is, in its modest way, one of the great quiet successes of British healthcare over the last decade. Nobody voted for it, nobody legislated it into being with a grand ten-year plan, and yet it works. It exists because Boots and Superdrug and the local independents worked out that people would pay a small sum for convenience, speed, and the absence of a three-week wait. I propose that we should extend this principle, and put a doctor in there as well.” (07/13/26)
- It’s Been Ten Years; Time To Admit Bernie Sanders Was Wrong
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone“Everyone’s talking about how progressive Democrat Graham Platner has been forced to drop out of his Senate race following allegations of sexual assault. Personally I never paid attention to Platner’s campaign, because I long ago stopped taking Democrats seriously. The first clue that Platner was a shitty person wasn’t his military service or his Blackwater stint or his tattoo or the sexual assault stuff, it was that he ran for high office in the US government under one of America’s two mainstream parties. That’s damning in and of itself. I said this on Twitter today and some DSA guy told me the best way to make changes in US politics is to work within the Democratic Party to elect left-wing candidates and advance progressive agendas.” (07/10/26)
- $6 million a day: Trump’s disclosures show he is the swamp’s biggest monster
Source: The Hill
by Svante Myrick“President Trump told his followers he would ‘drain the swamp.’ Instead, he became the biggest swamp monster ever. He has obliterated the line between public service and personal enrichment. Trump’s recent financial disclosures revealed that he made $2.2 billion in the year since he returned to office. That is a breathtaking figure. It is more than 20 times the annual budget of the city of Ithaca, N.Y., where I served as mayor for 10 years. In other words, Trump raked in, on average, more than $6 million a day, seven days a week.” (07/13/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5963054-trump-corruption-financial-disclosures/
- The Best Thing About Wokeness
Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan“What’s the best thing about wokeness? Simple: Holding people in the past to universal moral standards. History is packed with mass murder, slavery, and other atrocities, often committed by famous beloved figures like Columbus and the American Founding Fathers. When confronted with these harsh realities, most thinkers try to weasel out with a variation on, ‘It was a very different time.’ The woke, on the other hand, want to not only teach kids about mass murder and slavery, but tear down the statues of mass murderers and slavers. Which is the rational position. … Sadly, wokeness aggressively refuses to universalize its own universalism. If we should hold people in the past to universal moral standards, we should also hold people in the present to universal moral standards, not credulously accept lame, lawyerly excuses like, ‘In their culture, this is normal’ or ‘Given their life story, we mustn’t blame them.'” (07/13/26)
- Don’t Blame the Billionaires, Change the Incentives
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith“One way a person can become a billionaire is by providing people with a product or service they want. As various economists have pointed out, the money people use to acquire the product or service is like a vote cast. The votes can change overnight if the entrepreneur fails to deliver what people want at a price they can afford, or if a competitor offers something people perceive as better or cheaper. This process of voluntary production and exchange is the free market in action. But security agencies are needed to keep this process free of coercion. … If government stayed in the role of rights-protector the market might function smoothly. But it has never remained confined to that purpose. The idea of ‘protection’ has expanded over time to become a lucrative racket.” (07/13/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/dont-blame-billionaires-change-incentives
- NY business group campaigns to end “Prohibition-era” alcohol restrictions statewide
Source: Fox News
by Lindsay Kornick“The Business Council of New York State is seeking to repeal ‘Prohibition-era’ alcohol laws. The New York Post reported that the organization launched its ‘New Yorkers Cheers for Change’ campaign on Sunday, pushing a proposal that would counter the state’s restrictions on alcohol sales. ‘New York has some of the most restrictive Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) laws the entire nation because they were created during the Prohibition-era. Current ABC laws impede economic growth, job opportunities, consumer choice, and New York’s own wine and distilled spirits industry,’ the organization’s website read. The ‘Cheers for Change’ campaign followed the 2023 Commission to Study Reform of the Alcohol Beverage Control Law, launched under New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, to recommend ways to update state laws, such as relaxing its 200 Foot Law and 500 Foot Law.” (07/13/26)
- The Digital Euro’s New Chapter
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes“In the end, the digital euro does not liberate Europe, modernize it, or make payments more convenient. It merely changes who holds control, shifting it from American private companies to European public authorities, and strengthens that control in the process. At its core, this project reveals a profound civilizational choice: money ceases to belong primarily to individuals, as the state assumes the power to define the limits of financial freedom.” (07/13/26)
- First Amendment Protects Universities From Florida’s Stop WOKE Act
Source: Reason
by JD Tuccille“The cure for a regime of establishment-approved ideology does not come from government censorship of conversations. That should be clear to anybody who believes in freedom, and it’s a point strongly made by a federal appeals court in overruling Florida’s Stop WOKE Act. Saying the First Amendment is incompatible with ‘an official government line—in a college classroom of all places,’ the court overruled the state’s effort to battle ideological orthodoxy by imposing its own orthodoxy.” (07/13/26)
https://reason.com/2026/07/13/first-amendment-protects-universities-from-floridas-stop-woke-act/
- Keeping Cool: The Air Conditioner That Changed America
Source: The Daily Economy
by Gale Pooley“With sweltering temperatures once again gripping much of the world, it is worth appreciating air conditioning — the quiet invention that transforms dangerous heat into manageable discomfort, shields millions from heat-related suffering and death, boosts productivity, and makes once-hostile climates livable. It is a powerful reminder that wealth, innovation, and human ingenuity enable societies to adapt to nature’s extremes and protect human life. To understand why the US heat death rate is 59 times lower than that of Europe, it helps to begin with a young engineer named Willis Carrier.” (07/13/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/keeping-cool-the-air-conditioner-that-changed-america/
- NATO 3.0 Emerges Alive and Dangerous from the Ankara Summit
Source: Common Dreams
by Joseph Gerson“Despite its well-advertised tensions and tectonic geopolitical changes, this week’s NATO summit demonstrated that NATO has survived and is resilient. It remains committed to reinforcing US hegemony across Europe and globally. Not a lot has changed since former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that US global dominance relies on controlling the periphery of Eurasia: NATO in the West, in Southwest Asia to the South, as well as its Asia-Pacific allies from South Korea and Japan through the Philippines and Australia. In the 21st century, military planning as well as trade is deeply integrated across these three regions. The Summit served to reinforce what is emerging as a new bloc system for our yet to be named era. Threatened by the US and NATO, as John Mearsheimer remarked, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea each see the US as a mortal enemy.” (07/13/26)
- A new US-Iran war would end where the last one did
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Trita Parsi“For all practical purposes, the U.S.-Iran Memorandum of (Mis)Understanding is over. The dispute over how to manage the Strait of Hormuz in the interim has pushed the two sides back into open war. But to what end? There is little reason to believe another round of fighting can alter the fundamentals enough to change the reality from which the two sides must ultimately negotiate. If they are fortunate, the MOU’s collapse may yield another round of talks in which the allure of reshaping facts on the ground through force has finally faded.” (07/13/26)
- Reason Roundtable, 07/13/26
Source: Reason
“Did Lindsey Graham Push Trump Toward War?” (07/13/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/07/13/did-lindsey-graham-push-trump-toward-war/
- Rising, 07/13/26
Source: The Hill
“Robby Soave gives his radar reflecting on the career of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who died on Saturday at the age of 71.” (07/13/26)
- Radio Atlantic, 07/13/26
Source: The Atlantic
“The War Trump Can’t Control.” (07/13/26)
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/07/ra-iran-reescalation/687849/
- Parallax Views w/ JG Michael, 07/13/26
Source: Parallax Views w/ JG Michael
“A Nation Wrestles With God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands w/ Ilan Stavans.” (07/13/26)
- Ron Paul Liberty Report, 07/13/26
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
“Trump: ‘WE Are Going To Control Hormuz Strait!'” (07/13/26)
- EconTalk, 07/13/26
Source: EconTalk
“From Sawdust to Paw Patrol: The Spin Master Story (with Ronnen Harary).” (07/13/26)
https://www.econtalk.org/from-sawdust-to-paw-patrol-the-spin-master-story-with-ronnen-harary/
- The Reconstruction Agenda, 07/13/26
Source: The UnPopulist
“Fixing America’s Negative Polarization With Proportional Representation: A Conversation With Lee Drutman.” (07/13/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/fixing-americas-negative-polarization